Guest blogger, Carolyn Ride, is just realising the real impact of the Bonds layoff…

There are many tragic aspects to the decision this week by Pacific Brands (maker of iconic Aussie label Bonds) to cut 1850 Australian manufacturing jobs and move production to China.

There’s the effect on the workers and their families themselves; especially since it seems they had no idea it was coming. There’s the fact that (surprise!) they rewarded their CEOs for failure with multimillion-dollar payouts (AUD$1.86 million a year salary for current exec Sue Morphet). Then there’s the revelation that Pacific Brands milked millions of dollars in research and investment grants from the Australian government in recent years, just before pulling the plug. Oh, and the loss of yet another iconic Aussie brand to faceless, soulless globalisation.

And yet there are other victims in this tragedy unremarked by the media; untold millions of lesbians who will now officially have nothing to wear!

Bonds Chesty Girl

According to a straw poll of friends etc, I’m apparently a femme. Either it’s the dress fetish or my taste for ladies’ drinks that gave it away. Still, when I look in my wardrobe I have about four men’s “Chesty Bond” white Bonds singlets; not to mention two fitted black cotton T-shirts, two sports bras and three pairs of sports socks. They’re all Bonds products which fit lesbian fashion demands (simplicity, practicality, natural fibres, moderate price, mildly androgynous) better than anything else made.

I don’t know why this is, but only men’s Chesty Bonds singlets give adequate support for the braless bosom while equally able to cover up the straps of one’s comfy yet supportive 16DD Bonds cotton bra. (Just try to find a regular brand bra in larger cup sizes that doesn’t feel like a mammogram).

The indispensable Bonds raglan tee

They also make the only T-shirts I know that mysteriously make me look 20% trimmer and more muscular. They have been a way for women at a certain end of the Kinsey scale to look smart and stylish,  yet classically lestastic, for decades. 

They also answered the most important lesbian fashion demand of all time, the one that never changes: the ability to buy all your clothes, from underwear to jackets, in one section of any major department store. Thus, getting a whole season’s wardrobe takes only half an hour, leaving ample time for the electronics and outdoor goods sections.

Let’s face it, many Bonds products were already manufactured in China. At least, though, the company had enough presence in the Australian market to know its certain attachment to fit over fashion, durability and the need for the odd classic product that never changes. Much like the lesbian market.

But now? Even if the products don’t go downhill, I – like so many lesbians – am a world-class boycotter, so I won’t support a company which so obviously screwed its employees. Meanwhile, wild horses wouldn’t drag me into one of those Cotton On, Rivers etc chains that sell T-shirts that lose shape if you look at them harshly. And those singlets with giant, gaping armholes presumably meant to advertise the age and discolouration level of your bra.

I propose a general f*** you to Pacific Brands’ contempt for its employees, the Australian taxpayer and the mass of lesbian consumers that kept it going through bad times and good. Meanwhile, the entrepreneurial door is now open for any lesbian with an industrial sewing machine and the desire to make a killing in a very captive and very desperate market.

Carolyn Ride is a writer, editor and owns enough Bonds products to attend shareholder meetings.

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1. The Global Financial Crisis is My Fault
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3. Farewell to lesbian feminism

Oh, and it’s yours too.

Guest blogger, Carolyn Ride, comes clean and reveals the real players in the economic meltdown. It’s ugly folks but the truth must out.

As the storm clouds of the global financial crisis were gathering in the US in early 2008, and we watched in alarm as the map showed said storm ready to flatten the rest of the world, the experts started looking for who to blame.

I have to say, a lot of, like, fully unfair stones were cast at those unsung heroes of the financial coalface (or, in the case of our mineral exports, the literal coalface). These bankers, non-conforming lenders, stockbrokers, retailers, wholesalers and insurers, whose only mission is to provide their customers (us) with superior, internationally competitive and best practice products were accused of heinous crimes. Over-borrowing. Over-lending. Falsifying their reports and covering up their losses. Spending more profligately and unwisely than an oil sheik at a gold bathroom fittings warehouse.

Fortunately, wiser heads eventually prevailed and now we’re hearing financial commentary that’s not afraid to take on the real architects of all this global pain. Me and you. We wanted it all. We wanted to own the giant McMansion in the burbs and the tree-change weekender powered by positive thoughts. We wanted the plasma screen TV and the Tivo and the King Island brie and the closet full of Made In China clothes (timed perfectly to fall apart in one month or when fashions changed, whichever came first). We wanted to make two grand a week digging polluting coal out of the ground and to get flown to the city for R&R by long-suffering employers. We were perverse with Thing Lust, feverish with Affluenza, and controlled only by forces even darker than our own impulses: Tween girls and toddlers drunk on pester power.

It took real courage for a brave few – economists, politicians, a couple of Wall Street Warriors – to speak out, hesitantly at first, to say that the crisis was regular people’s fault and not the experts unjustly singled out simply because it was their job to manage money, market cycles and consumer demand.

The debate had been hamstrung by muddled thinking. Should an organisation whose business is loans be forced to take the blame for encouraging the financially unstable to get into debt, then using their repayments to play (and lose in) the short-term money market? Should the government of, say, Australia, be criticised for basing all their plans for prosperity on selling raw materials instead of encouraging clean industry and knowledge economies? Should CEOs be forced to pay back their megabonuses when their companies fail, or even get prosecuted for falsifying corporate reports?

Plenty of bitter, jealous types like Ross Gittins of the Sydney Morning Herald thought so, not even caring how such sniping could damage a leader’s self-esteem. Lucky there was the example of the corporate and government response to global warming to guide the experts, or we might still be ruled by Tall Poppy Syndrome. “As a giant agribusiness corporation, we would be so hurting if you made us go green. We’d have no choice but to make the economy suffer. Anyway, it’s not our fault. It’s those yobs who drive old cars, do five loads of washing in a top-loader and leave their lights on”. Cue “10 things you can do” awareness pamphlet sponsored by agribusiness corporation and a government-sponsored “dob in a V8 driver” hotline.

Sure, as individuals we are learning to be more aware of our patterns of excess and debt. But that hardly means we have learned the real lesson, which is “It’s ALL our fault”. Our Federal Government took valuable time at the end of last year away from bailing out car manufacturers and success-phobic childcare centres to hand some of you cash money to ease the financial stress of Christmas. All they asked in return is that you do a little bit of meaningless consumption – I mean, do your bit to support the economy. Yet so many people (I’m ashamed to say, including me) didn’t do the big Christmas shop. Some even, as the financial analyst on SBS News said with disgust, put their handout into debt repayment or savings.

So I take responsibility for all the credit-fuelled consumption frenzy that led to the economy overheating and the subsequent crash. I also take responsibility for saving when I should have started spending. As should you. 

On behalf of ordinary people who should have done better, I apologise to the people who simply found themselves at the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong bag of money in their hands – ours. I’ll apologise to you in person should we ever meet at the traffic lights as I’m washing the window of your Lexus for small change.

Carolyn Ride is a writer, reviewer and editor who has generously contributed this article in the hope that I will stop nagging her about doing her own blog. I would love to provide a link to her other writing, but, she doesn’t have a website. (Or a blog!) – TW

Yeah, but I have my own team of scribes chiselling my words of wisdom as we speak. Check again in ten years – CR

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